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Monthly Archives: May 2014

The original concept has started out from users, groups and resources as the basic building blocks of mycitizen.net, suggesting their equal significance. It nevertheless was clear from the beginning that these three categories would not contribute with the same quantity of items, and particularly groups and resources would be used in very different ways:

It can be assumed that each user is able to participate only in a very limited number of groups, and the number of users certainly exceeds the number of groups. Groups would naturally serve as focal points of activity and as nodes of communication.

The number of resources could easily grow into larger quantities. Imagine, for example, that a group decides to import a voluminous library of reports. You may easily end up with numerous entries in the listings that all look similar, making it arduous to find the relevant ones.

Despite their different nature is the filter mechanism almost the same for users, groups and resources. This is by design since the concern (or interest), the language and the geographic location are the primary criteria that define relevance across the entire platform. The current method of filtering by tags and a search radius on the map may, however, still leave you with 100 or 200 entries that are potentially interesting. So how would you find what really matters?

The natural way how most people would probably tackle this task is to look through the results and to gradually narrow down the selection by discarding unsuitable items. Unhappy with the presently available options, I realized that a distinct form of presentation was needed for resources, a search layout with the following features:

Resources should be displayed on one page, rather than users having to browse through long lists that span over many pages.

The selection of displayed items should immediately reflect changes in the filter settings.

After automatic filtering, it should be possible to additionally hide Items manually, or to re-order them by simple drag-and-drop.

The first feature is something you know from most other websites, and we have already employed this technology in the chats: Most pages – and particularly where you browse through lists or click to detail views – are now reloaded only in their central parts while the unchanged components are not fetched unless needed.1
This “partial reloading into the existing page” tremendously speeds up the browsing speed since data amounts and the number of requests to the server are drastically reduced. If something gets stuck, you can of course still reload the page in the browser. You are also able to share the URL as direct link to a page.
This feature might need some further testing under various conditions, and particularly an unsteady connection might lead to lost page transitions. Nevertheless, we are confident that it deserves to be released in this beta version due to its importance, and of course only after much in-house testing.

This new feature enables us to deliver a second feature, namely to attach a chat window to the steady part.2 Users can therefore browse the pages while keeping the chat open.
The chat (precisely private messages) on mycitiizen.net is fully WYSIWYG-enabled and it is therefore not easy to squeeze it to slimmer dimensions. We decided in favour of a solution that lets the user switch between the full width and a very reduced sidebar that regularly polls the server for changes.

Recent changes include a check to prevent identical subsequent messages in chats. Particularly users in Myanmar (Burma) have often accidentally sent the same message multiple times because an extremely slow Internet connection has delayed the delivery. In another response to in-the-field test results, we have added a dialog window to make sure you don’t accidentally navigate away from a page while you are writing a message.

The most visible change is probably the filter button that – when filtering is active – displays the applied criteria directly on top of the listings. While browsing the filtered list of items, you, therefore, see immediately how this selection was created.

Further additions allow you to refer in messages to other users, groups or resources by using their IDs prepended by @1. The same symbol can be used to trigger a search, while searching by tags is done with #. Read more about it in the user manual or see yourself on the demo.